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Only a Visitor
Decay
Mint - 2023
Michael Panontin
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Some eight years and three albums into their career, Vancouver's Only a Visitor made the jump from DIY-land to that city's long-running indie label, Mint Records. The five-piece was formed in 2015 by classically trained - but, adds Mint, "DIY-nurtured" - keyboardist Robyn Jacob, who wisely surrounded herself with a talented crew of backing singers Emma Postl and Celina Kurz, along with bassist Jeff Gammon and drummer Kevin Romain.
They were dubbed "Bjork's light-footed nymph child" by Beatroute, as apt a description as any I suppose for a group that trades in lithe, three-part vocal harmonies perched atop nimble keyboards and a delicate, unobtrusive rhythm section. How those harmonies developed out of someone who was essentially a pianist is not as far-fetched as it seems.
"I used to play solo, and I was getting really frustrated with the instrument," Jacob explained in a 2019 live session for CJSF radio. "I wanted to be more portable with music that I was making and I was like, 'What if it was just voices?'." For their part, Postl and Kurz had studied jazz vocals together - "Lots of harmony stuff," they chimed in almost in unison - and were at least partly prepared to tackle Jacob's complex vocal parts.
Compared with its predecessors, and especially when seen through the starry prism of 2019's Technicolour Education, Decay is a somewhat more sombre, more spacious affair. Once you get past the single, 'What Does Waiting Mean', an infectiously pretty four-and-a-half-minute tune that opens the record, things start to veer down more intimate avenues. On quieter tracks like 'Degree by Degree', the harmonies are exquisite, while a song like the achingly lovely 'A Whole of a Life' is a near-perfect mesh of keyboards and voice. By the time you get to the closer, 'It's Like Looking Down', Jacob has stripped things down to just acoustic piano and solo voice, and the results are, like much of the album, a thing of a shimmering beauty.
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